This is the second in my series of paintings of the planets and today it's…
A Victim Of Higher Space
I enjoyed painting the foreground in that last painting so much that I decided to go straight into another painting afterwards. So I reached for one of the three crackle pasted boards that I’d prepared yesterday. All I wanted to paint was an imaginary hill and a sky, so I went for the board that was divided into two textures where I’d embedded a satsuma bag in the paste and pulled it out the following morning.
I started with acrylic inks, putting indigo into the sky, tipping the board backwards and trying to get the ink to run into the cracks in the sky while leaving islands of white between the cracks using granulation medium, water spray and kitchen paper. I think I got there. But when I tried to repeat the exercise on the foreground with sepia and Earth red inks, I found the texture to be so churned up and rough that I couldn’t remove all the ink, so it’s still there, adding earthy undertones.
And then I went in with all the tundra supergranulators, using only the blue, pink and violet in the sky but all five colours in foreground. I just added colours wherever I thought the painting needed them for balance. Except for the tundra green – I generally tried to keep that to the lower slopes. I added some white ink at one point, hoping it might run into some of the deeper cracks but without much luck. It did add some lighting highlights in places, though, and I may have added some more highlights with a bit of kitchen paper dabbing.
This one was really just about having fun, and I think that’s what I needed to get me back on track. This is my best painting since moving into the studio. I especially like all the bits of green on the hillside and like tundra green a lot more than I did before after completing these two paintings today. This one’s going up for sale unframed. It’s only simple but sometimes simple’s all that’s needed.
I was late getting up this morning (sometime between half eight and nine) and did my daily German lesson on the iPad before heading outside. I was expecting Looking At You to take up most of the day and was shocked when I found myself stopping for lunch at 1.30pm with two paintings completed. I think it’s painting on these weird surfaces that speeds me up: there’s no waiting around for paper to dry.
And this one’s named after an Algernon Blackwood short story. The website with a list of names of his stories might have disappeared but I just remembered I have a collection of them on my Kindle and can look there.
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